Crafting Feminism from Literary Modernism to the Multimedia Present
Produktdetaljer
Biografisk notat
AMY E. ELKINS is Associate Professor of English and Creative Writing at Macalester College. As a scholar and multimedia artist, her work is situated at the intersection of theory, archives, and creative practice. Her scholarship and art have been published in such places as PMLA, Contemporary Literature, Modernism/modernity Print Plus, Post45 Contemporaries, and Inscription. Elkins leads interdisciplinary dialogues and collaborates with writers, artists, and curators in spaces from art museums to podcasts.I frequently recommend Crafting Feminism to students looking for innovative, rigorous work on materiality and literary and cultural practice [...] It is a monograph that makes possible a whole new kind of feminist scholarship: one that includes experiments in material craft practice, creative-critical fusions, and theoretical gestures all collaged together to make a fragmentary whole. This is an urgent and beautiful example of scholarly and artistic practice: it remakes scholarship as a site for creative energy and as a celebration of historically marginalized identities [...] This book is rich, and full, and maximalist. It is a triumphant and brave first book that remakes feminist scholarly practice. It is a joyous celebration of texture, text, and textile, and of the human fragility and feeling that those media can help us see.
Claire Battershill, Feminist Modernist Studies
A "brilliantly original exploration of craftwork and archives": Elkins reads lines of stitching as carefully and imaginatively as she reads lines of text... The book itself is a remarkable object by the standards of academic publishing.
Mark Hussey, Virginia Woolf Miscellany
Elkins demonstrates that collage and patchwork's specific ability to draw various elements together - like the intersections of different aspects of identity - allows for differences to exist in complex unity in craft just as they do within people. Therefore, through an attention to the medium specificities of their processes, Elkins brilliantly establishes that collage and patchwork are formally intersectional media that resist reductive arguments around identity. [...] Elkins makes a compelling and creative contribution and, following Crafting Feminism's project 'to loosen the binding of the academic monograph', perhaps we too shall find new ways of working to re-ink, re-print, re-collage, and re-stitch feminist research.
Alice Dodds, The Courtauld
For too long, 'craft' has been denigrated as the lowbrow cousin of 'art'— something unserious, a hobby, perhaps because often practiced by women...But scholarship, galleries, and museums are taking craft as seriously as 'high art.' Amy E. Elkins's masterful Crafting Feminism brings this attitude to literary studies, offering not just a study of how craft matters to modernism and feminist art but also a methodology for studying art, craft, literature, and their intersections...Elkins explicitly draws on her 'persistent sense of wonder' together with an eagerness to 'tap into sources of joy as valid intellectual responses'—approaches that for far too long were shunned from academic work.
Catherine E. Paul, Woolf Studies Annual
Central to Elkins's study is an endeavor to illuminate the ways in which women writers wield miscellaneous media to destabilize traditional approaches and craft avant-garde feminist agendas. To this end, Elkins critically invokes a constellation of intersectional and interdisciplinary methodologies, especially queer theory and archival discovery [...] More than a piece of finalized art, it elasticizes the process of making—principally a subjective, gendered proces — thereby enabling "political resistance and narratives of critique and remaking".
Jiayuan Zuo, Women's Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal
Elkins proposes a transmedia, feminist analysis of history in order to '[craft] a new modernity-one that is queer and feminist-threaded, messy, shattered, cut-up, pasted together, reflected, and spun out' (13). In this way, Elkins's genealogy of feminist making, thoughtfully informed by the reciprocal, generative relationship between craft and literature, emerges as an aspirational and innovative model for modernist scholars. Crafting Feminism meaningfully continues the efforts of New Modernist Studies and scholars like Susan Stanford Friedman and Sonita Sarker to weave a more capacious, inclusive, interdisciplinary, and transtemporal framework beyond the modernist canon. [...] The book itself is a beautifully crafted artifact, knitting together a variety of media and genres into a novel, compelling, and enjoyable work.
Nat McGartland and Diana Proenza,Modernism/modernity